Wednesday, March 29, 2006

I KNOW THIS! I KNOW THIS! THE ANSWER IS 1!

"I recently got caught by PartyPoker and PokerStars using multiple accounts in tournaments. There were six different PartyPoker accounts that I used. For big tournaments, I would often use these accounts to enter a single tournament with four entries. (I used all six once or twice, but generally used four) I did this by exploiting a bug which let you open multiple PartyPoker clients on your computer simply by clicking on the icon rapidly. On PokerStars, I had a single extra account which was mostly used by people other than me, but occasionally I did use it to double enter large PokerStars tournaments."

Okay, you cheated. Got it. You weren't content to simply enter a tournament but you wanted to increase your likelihood of winning to 6x, 4x, or 2x. And don't try to muddy the water by saying it was a "bug" that allowed all this. That "bug" didn't suddenly create multiple accounts for you, or login with them, or register for a tournament with them.

"At that time, I unfortunately did not realize that what I was doing was unethical. For starters, many of the poker players that I have learned from were using the same practice. This obviously doesn’t make it ok, but I wasn’t questioning it at the time. Until recently; this wasn’t a well hidden fact. People seemed to accept it as ok and talked about it in the open."

And did this people live on Planet Bizarro, where the illogical is suddenly logical? Dude, you knew that was cheating. Give me a fucking break. Other people were doing it, so you did it. Because everyone was doing it, you assumed it was okay. That's some bang-up reasoning there, chief. And that's the best excuse you can summon, after all this time? Back to cheater school for you.

"Also, the idea was NOT to collude or chip dump with myself in any way. I only multi accounted in tournaments with thousands of players where it would be very unlikely for me to ever end up at the same table as myself. If the goal was collusion, I would have multi-entered smaller tournaments like sit’n’gos. This is something that I have never done."

Hopefully even you are smart enough to realize that dumping chips to yourself via multiple accounts isn't a good idea, so I'll give you this one. But you realize, yes, that it's sort of like a kidnapper saying "I just mean to kidnap them and ransom them off for millions, I didn't mean to steal their wallet in their back pocket as well, so PLEASE don't consider me a thief, just a kidnapper."

The idea wasn't to collude or chip dump. Gotcha. It was to cheat and give yourself a better chance of winning than those not cheating, by entering multiple times. Gotcha.

"I don’t think Party handled the situation as well as they could have. The money taken from me was won legitimately, almost entirely from sit’n’gos. None of the other accounts I used had any big tournament scores; in fact, they lost money overall in the few tournaments that they entered. Party has a zero tolerance policy which in my opinion is unfair. If I had only double entered a single $10 tournament, by the same policy, that would be grounds for them to confiscate $100,000 from me which seems unreasonable. The punishment was arbitrary, and no investigation was done to determine a reasonable adjustment. I feel like the amount of my punishment has been determined by what was in my account, rather than by what a thorough investigation would have determined."

"In the past month, I have come to many realizations. Once the shit hit the fan with Josh, I did some thinking and determined that it was indeed wrong to enter tournaments on multiple accounts. I have not done it since the JJProdigy incident, and I will never do it again."

Hahahahahahaha. So when someone got busted for cheating in a similar fashion, you started doing some serious thinking, and realized that what you did might be wrong?

"I have many friends that have multi-accounted tournaments in the past. To my knowledge, they have all stopped, but I want to encourage them to talk to me if they still do it. I will explain to them exactly why it is wrong on both an ethical and practical level."

Umm, I think you're already a pretty good example of why people might not want to play multiple accounts in the same tournament, hoss. If they haven't gotten the message by now I'm not sure waiting to chat with them when they get off the short bus is going to do much good.

"It also leads to many gray areas in terms of ethics that should not exist at all. How many accounts is it ok to play with? Is two any better than fifty? What number of players in the tournament makes it ok? It’s obviously wrong in a 10 player tournament, but what about 100, 1,000 or 10,000? There is no one number at which you can draw a line and say, with 673 players or more it’s ok. Also, if you do happen to wind up at the same table as yourself, what is proper protocol? Should you try to play normal? Should you sit one account out? What if there are 5 people at your table each with two accounts making up ten players? Is there any way that game can be on the level?"

I KNOW THE ANSWER! THE ANSWER IS 1! 1 ACCOUNT PER PLAYER! WHAT DO I WIN? DO I GET A COOKIE?

To be fair, I'm picking out the stuff that's easily mocked, and he did make the effort to post on his site and apologize. He got caught cheating, lost a chunk of money, and is exposed as an idiot for every hack like myself to openly mock. I don't doubt he's a fairly decent guy and that he feels like crap because he got caught.

I also don't doubt, for a second, that he knew exactly what he was doing the entire time, and knew at least some of the risks involved. He obviously wasn't prepared to have all six acounts closed and emptied of funds, or there wouldn't have been around $100K lying around in them. In the grand scheme of things, yeah, he wasn't even securing that huge an edge by running 4-6 accounts in the same big tournaments.

But it was/is an edge, which is the whole reason that he and other players do it. That's the part that cracks me up. He keeps pointing out that he'd NEVER sully the sanctity of poker by chip dumping or colluding between accounts, but manages to ignore the simple fact that the only reason a person creates multiple accounts and runs them in the same tourney is to get an unfair edge. That's it. There's no other reason. None.

4 comments:

I can't believe this retard has the balls to criticize Party Poker about this.

What about the damage he's done to Party Poker's reputation. The fact that it has been very well publicized that people have been cheating on Party Poker has damaged their reputation, mostly because of this tool, and he thinks it's "unfair" that they confiscated some of his (possibly) honestly earned poker winnings?

He's fortunate he's not being punished criminally for his acts, yet he still maintains that HE'S the one who was treated unfairly.

I guess I have a bit of a different view on this. Putting aside all his self-justification and backpedaling, I continue to think that the whole thing was a lark regarding discovery and identified the abysmal security from Party et al. Online poker's rigged and all that: I'm not saying that, but we pay the rake for protection that we're in a fair game. All in all, I think the online sites have been exposed, the question is will anything significant change?